Women in French Studies

For twenty-five years, Constant Venesoen has been a pioneer in the study of seventeenth-century French women writers, beginning with his Etudes sur la Littérature Féminine du XVIIe Siècle (Summa, 1990). He went on to publish editions of the works of Marie de Gournay (1993 Marie de Gournay (1998); of Madame de Pringy (2000); Anne-Marie de Schurman (2004); Madame de Brégy (2006); and finally Madame de Maintenon (2011) of whom he has also published a biography (2012).

This review concerns Venesoen’s edition of Les Loisirs de Madame de Maintenon (Garnier 2011). Despite the fact that this edition was published six years ago, it still merits attention, in part for the contrast it presents to the edition of the Proverbes Dramatiques (Garnier 2014), reviewed in WIF Studies, Vol. 24, 2016 (pp. 150–53). Readers may refer to those two reviews for background information on Madame de Maintenon herself, generally better known for her adventurous life as the grand-daughter of poet Agrippa d’Aubigné, wife of satirist Paul Scarron, and finally as second and morganatic wife of Louis XIV. Her voluminous works are less well known, although they were frequently edited in [End Page 204] the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Aside from the letters, most of her works concern the school she founded in Paris for impoverished noble and bourgeois girls, Saint Cyr. It is difficult to date these works precisely, since many were written down by the author’s assistant, Mlle d’Aumale, but then printed later under a variety of titles, and in various different selections, depending on the interests of each editor or publisher. A good introduction to Madame de Maintenon’s work for anglophones is John Conley’s Madame de Maintenon: Dialogues and Addresses, from the Other Voice Series (Chicago, 2004).

The title, Les Loisirs, seems to repeat that of the first 1757 edition, but the collection has also been published under the titles Conversations, Entretiens, Conseils et Instructions. The book represents a collection of thirty-six conversations on a variety of moral and philosophical topics, followed by an additional fifteen conversations which were left out of the 1757 edition. These conversations are similar in some ways to the previously reviewed Proverbes Dramatiques. Both books represent a group of girls discussing a topic which has been suggested to them. The Proverbes are really dramatic scenes, and each ends with a proverb as the “lesson” to be derived from the discussion. The Proverbes may have been written earlier (1680’s), and for younger girls, than is the case with the Loisirs.

The Loisirs, on the other hand, may have been written later (1690’s and early 1700’s), and seem to be directed to older girls, probably those in the last group, aged 17 to 20. These conversations are more abstract than those in the earlier book, and focus on defining a variety of concepts, which appear as the titles for each one. Some examples are: “Sur la Société,” “Sur la Raison,” “Sur la Contrainte,” “Sur l’Amour Propre,” and “Sur le Bon Esprit.” Several of the distinctions made by the young ladies are quite subtle and lucid, worthy of “moralistes” like La Rochefoucauld or La Bruyère. Generally, there is a conclusion which suggests a conventional morality for women, of the “chaste, silent and obedient” variety. The book is not “feminist” in any modern sense. But frequently the most interesting comments are made by rebellious girls who question the dominant ideology of the book, for example the strange bias against intellectual women (reminiscent of Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes). Issues of social class are frequently raised, and the girls are taught to understand and to accept the hierarchy of seventeenth-century society. The dialogic structure, however, does leave the reader the option of selecting the opinions with which he or she agrees. This tension is one of the most interesting facets of the book, as...